10,000 Fahrenheit

Curator. San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries: Main Gallery. September - December, 2018

Artists: Jean-Pierre Aubé, Sarah and Joseph Belknap, Lisa K. Blatt, Linda Connor, Christopher Robin Duncan, William Lamson, Chris McCaw, and Antonia Wright

10,000 Fahrenheit examines the poetics of attempting to define that which does not exist in order to better understand our place in the universe. The exhibition brings together works that reference the sun, heat, and light, but are ultimately grounded in the artists’ engagement with endurance, memory, resilience, the passage of time, and personal connections to the cosmos. Through this lens, the artists bridge dialogues between contemporary art, human desire, and scientific observation, creating a space where visual experience and empirical investigation intersect.

Renowned Bay Area photographer Linda Connor gained rare access to solar eclipse glass negatives from 1889–1918 housed at the Lick Observatory and spent fifteen years producing sun-exposed contact prints that compress time and explore celestial phenomena. Similarly, Chicago-based artists Sarah and Joseph Belknap documented the sun’s spots over a year as a personal diary, translating fleeting thoughts into celestial imagery. Bay Area painter Christopher Robin Duncan treats his sun-faded fabric works as paintings, wrapping materials around windows and skylights for months to allow the sun’s passage to shape the final image. Miami-based Antonia Wright’s video Under the Water Was Sand, Then Rocks, Miles of Rocks, Then Fire captures a moment of tension and vulnerability as she walks across a frozen expanse and plunges beneath the ice, while Lisa K. Blatt’s large-scale “heatscapes” combine abstraction and landscape photography to explore environmental, social, and personal narratives in extreme locations worldwide.

Environmental conditions and endurance also structure works by Montreal-based Jean-Pierre Aubé, who records solar radio transmissions as chaotic audio-visual compositions, and Bay Area-based Chris McCaw and Brooklyn-based William Lamson, who employ the sun itself as a temporal instrument. McCaw retrofitted a 1913 panoramic camera to document the sun’s path over 80 hours in the Arctic Circle, while Lamson used a large-lens cart to burn a 352-foot black arc into the Mojave Desert, tracing the sun from dawn until dusk. Together, these works highlight the interplay of natural forces, human perception, and artistic intervention, emphasizing both the immensity and intimacy of the sun as a source of illumination, endurance, and reflection.

Note: 10,000 Fahrenheit coincided with two San Francisco-based international gatherings that focused on climate change: the Global Climate Action Summit in September and the World Cities Culture Summit in November. The SFAC Galleries worked closely with partners including: The San Francisco Department of the Environment, C40 Cities, and Autodesk.